The virtual Home Gateway (vHGW) removes most of the intelligence from the residential GW (RGW) and places this intelligence into the operator's infrastructure (e.g., Border Network Gateway (BNG), cloud). Doing this provides operators with better control over the RGW configuration in order to enable innovative services. In a basic vHGW deployment, the RGW is turned into a bridge running Software Defined Networking (SDN) components.
Among its key features, the vHGW connects the bridge to the Long Term Evolution (LTE) network. The interface between the vHGW and the LTE network is called an LTE backup channel (LBC). The LBC was originally designed to be used in case of uplink and/or vHGW node failure(s). The vHGW enables the LBC to inter-connect home devices as well as connecting them to the Internet by restoring the same network configurations as those implemented prior to the uplink and/or vHGW failure.
LTE and Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) interfaces are increasingly common on user's mobile devices (e.g., laptop, tablet, smartphone, etc). When at home, these devices would normally switch to WLAN (i.e., due to higher throughput, better coverage and lower battery power consumption). However, when these devices move outside of the WLAN umbrella, they need to switch to LTE in order to keep ongoing sessions alive.
It is important to mention that when one endpoint switches from a WLAN to a LTE network, the path to reach the other endpoint will change since LTE requires all data packets sent and/or received by the LTE interface to go through an Evolved Packet Gateway (EPG) node. It is also important to note that EPG and BNG(s) are infrastructure nodes that can be located far away from each other. When EPGs and BNGs are located far away from each, other possible effects of latency can degrade a user's perceived quality of experience.
What is needed, therefore, is a way to improve (or at least maintain) a user's quality of experience (QoE) when one endpoint switches to LTE (e.g., the user moves the device outside of the home WLAN umbrella) while communicating with another device located in another home WLAN network.